In previous posts in this blog I explored the connections with fashion and specific costumes in films.
Yet, while costumes represent vital points of reference in the development of the film narrative, they do not necessarily represent the one and only inspiration a film can offer for a fashion collection.
Indeed specific film sets can also provide many interesting inspirations, as we will see in today’s post.
Usually, when fashion designers claim they were inspired by a set, the first thing they mention is a particular nuance or colour combination that appears in a film, but today I'd like to focus on sets that can provide ideas for graphic prints, starting with an almost obvious choice, Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920).
As you may remember if you are a fan of this film, it was Caligari’s screenwriter Hans Janowitz who originally suggested to enlist painter and illustrator Alfred Kubin to create the film sets.
Kubin anticipated in his works - usually full of mysterious and dark visions - the art of the surrealist painters.
His style would have been perfect for a disturbing story featuring a somnambulist who predicted doomed and deadly prophecies.
But director Robert Wiene favoured in the end three expressionist painters to Kubin, Herman Warm, Walter Röhrig and Walter Reimann, from the Berlin based group Sturm.
In the early days of cinema it wasn’t so rare to see artists and painters collaborating on film sets.
Cinema was mainly a visual medium, so it was only natural for painters to work side by side with costume designers and directors, and, in many ways, some films interestingly turned into vehicles to promote specific art movements.
In Italy there were quite a few artists who worked on the development of the film language, from Virgilio Marchi to Duilio Cambellotti and Enrico Prampolini.
The latter created for example amazing sets that moved from the dynamic architectures and hypnotic geometries of the Futurist movement, based on a strong contrast between black and white, for Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s 1916 movie Thaïs.
The film, unanimously considered as a masterpiece of silent cinema, focused on a dark Russian lady, Thaïs Galitzy, a sort of femme fatale living in a labyrinthine villa who had the habit of seducing married men.
The painted sets perfectly interacted with the characters, creating a visionary and disturbing world that blurred the boundaries between reality and imagination.
Prampolini mainly took inspiration from the Liberty movement and symbolist art for this film sets, influencing German expressionism as well.
This is why many critics conceive Thaïs as a precursor of Caligari.
The three artists who worked on creating Caligari’s world moved from one main principle: a film is like a drawing, infused with life.
Caligari's sets featured complex silhouettes, disturbing diagonal forms, violent geometric shapes and fragmented and broken oneiric visions.
Most of the elements featured were transformed from ordinary objects into emotive elements: chimneys and roofs were characterised by distorted and oblique angles; doors looked as if they were going to collapse at any time, while windows turned into arrows, zigzagging lines that formed chaotic movements, destroying conventional perspectives and creating alternative ones full of doomed symbols and signs.
Integrating the characters into such settings proved difficult, yet it worked rather well, especially with two actors who looked at ease in this visionary world, Conrad Veidt who starred in the film as Cesare the somnambulist, and who seemed to effortlessly slide along the walls with his slim and shadowy figure, and Werner Krauss, in the role of the mysterious Caligari.
The chaotic ecstasy of the illogical tracts, lines, forms and shapes of the sets, the games of contrasts played by the chiaroscuro obsessed the minds of the spectator and also generated in it a sort of hallucinated anxiety.
Some critics interpreted the film sets in Caligari as a perfect representation of madness, though, it could be added, the sets were probably better used to interpret the psychological revolutions of the human mind and the cracks in the human soul.
Now, interpreting the meaning of the sets in Wiene’s film in this way, let’s transport those disquieting and disturbing lines into fashion and imagine them as prints.
The way we dress unconsciously reveals what we are, how we feel or what we dream about, so fashion is somehow deeply connected with psychological states.
Though it sounds difficult, it is therefore rather easy to imagine in fashion, something as complicated as an obsessed or disturbed state of mind.
A good example is provided by Givenchy’s Spring/Summer 2010 collection.
The designs included in this collection are mainly based on geometrical graphic lines, prints that remixed the elements of the classic kaffiyeh scarf.
Blown up, digitalised and twisted, applied to leggings, jackets and wedge sandals and boots, kaffiyeh prints assumed a different meaning, transforming into zigzagging patterns that distorted the body line, creating illusionary movements.
Optical black and white combinations were also used in geometrically cut tops and square jackets (borrowed from a design donned by David Bowie in a picture with Mick Ronson taken in 1973 View this photo) matched - to create further contrasts - with soft draped trousers with low crotches.
Exercise for fashion design students (all the others sit down and enjoy The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, embedded after the second image in this post): start from a silent film such as Robert Wiene's Genuine: The Tale of a Vampire (1920) and develop prints from the mind-bending graphic lines featured in its set.
Wonder how "Caligarisms" can help you creating optical effects and illusions and try to convey some symbolism through prints (or using appliquéd motifs), playing with themes such as confused and obsessed states of mind and the condition of a soul in turmoil.
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Hi Irene,
I've always loved reading your blog, but this post especially hit home. My thesis is on fashionable camouflage, and a lot of what you've shown - these disquieting, obsessive, chaotic and hallucinogenic effects - I feel can be directly attributed to the rise of Dazzle camouflage during WWI. I've found that many of the artist movements (Cubism, Vorticism, Futurism, Constructivism, Pointillism) all have as their foundation an attempt to fool the eye and confuse perception - thus achieving their aim through the same precepts as camouflage. Now, of course, actual military camouflage was predicated on the work that the aforementioned artists created, but I've found that in fashion (and perhaps film?) the role of the camoufleur and the beautiful dazzle schemes created in WWI were integral to much of the surface patterning found soon after. Perhaps this idea of camouflage (deception, confusion, and misperception) also played a role in film sets?
Posted by: Sarah Scaturro | May 22, 2010 at 02:19 AM